Gold Democrats

From Conservapedia

The Gold Democrats were conservative Democrats who strongly opposed the takeover of the Democratic Party in the 1896 U.S. presidential election by silverites, agrarians and radicals. They formed the National Democratic Party in 1896 as a vehicle for fellow Bourbon Democrats to oppose the regular Democratic party nominee William Jennings Bryan in the intensely fought presidential election of 1896. Most members were admirers of Grover Cleveland. They considered Bryan a dangerous man and charged that his "free silver" proposals would devastate the economy. They nominated the conservative Democratic politicians John M. Palmer, a former Republican governor of Illinois and Union general, and Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr., a former governor of Kentucky and Confederate general, for President and Vice President, respectively. The party only ran a few candidates for Congress and other offices including William Breckenridge in Kentucky.

The founders were disenchanted Democrats who saw it as a means to preserve the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Grover Cleveland. In its first official statement, the executive committee of the party accused the Democratic Party of forsaking this tradition by nominating Bryan.

For more than a century, it declared, the Democrats had believed:

In the ability of every individual, unassisted, if unfettered by law, to achieve his own happiness” and had upheld his “right and opportunity peaceably to pursue whatever course of conduct he would, provided such conduct deprived no other individual of the equal enjoyment of the same right and opportunity. [They] stood for freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of trade, and freedom of contract, all of which are implied by the century-old battle-cry of the Democratic party, "Individual Liberty."

Probably most backers of the ideals of the party ended up voting for Republican William McKinley in the 1896 election, but it did poll 137,000 votes, about 1.0%. After disappointing results in the 1898 elections, the executive committee voted to disband the party in 1900. Many former members probably returned to the regular party in 1900 because they opposed McKinley's imperialistic foreign policy.